has built up its business on the same sound principles that govern ours 

 will have had a similar satisfactory experience. ^1 



The first two months of the present year have also been characterised 

 by an animated demand and an increasing turnover, and there is every 

 prospect of continued favourable development, provided peace be main- 

 tained. By increasing the number of steam-boilers in our works to 23, 

 with an aggregate heating-area of 2500 sq. meters, we have prepared our- 

 selves for a further expansion of our output, after having been compelled 

 to raise our capacity of production to its highest power, by introducing 

 the day- and night-shift system in some of our principal departments, 

 thus securing continuous working. 



Before passing to our customary detailed review of the various markets 

 we are compelled, to our regret, to record the disagreeable fact that during 

 the past year the malpractice of adulteration has attained dimensions never 

 previously known in our branch. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony 

 on this subject is afforded by the numerous occasions on which our 

 testing-laboratory has been asked to pronounce an expert-opinion. The 

 alarming extent to which the ever-advancing scientific investigation of the 

 constituents of the essential oils is utilised by dishonest traders to prac- 

 tise cunning forms of adulteration, especially such as are designed to re- 

 present their goods as of better quality than they really are, is positively 

 astounding. In the great majority of cases the primary methods of exa- 

 mination, as for instance the determination of specific gravity, of solu- 

 bility and of optical rotation, and even the simpler chemical tests, such 

 as saponification and acetylation, no longer suffice to trace malpractices 

 of this kind, and it is necessary to carry out the various investigations 

 in all their complicated details in order to reveal the inferior nature of 

 the artificial mixtures. We regard it as a particularly painful matter that 

 firms should be found which are not ashamed openly to offer for sale 

 preparations that appear to be suitable for the manufacture of such in- 

 genious sophistications, and to offer them on the express ground that the 

 preparation serves some such purpose as that of apparently increasing 

 the ester-content of an oil. We have on previous occasions quoted several 

 instances of this practice, which is carried on sometimes by letter and 

 sometimes through travellers. That German firms should take part in 

 such a traffic is the more deplorable because it has been one of the chief 

 merits of the German research-chemists that for many years they have 

 successfully laboured to raise the whole of the essential oil trade to a ^ 

 higher level by establishing suitable methods of examination, and it must W 

 be obvious that for us, who have been pioneers in this field of research, 

 the existence of such malpractices must be particularly unpleasant. Quite 

 recently we were informed of a case in which a German firm which makes 

 pretensions to rank among the first and most important in the chemical 

 industry was offering in various places abroad preparations of which the 



